Experts Find Some Secrets To Happiness

Felicia Mason

January 05, 1998|By FELICIA MASON Daily Press

The pursuit is ongoing. Evidence is on the cover of popular magazines: "5 Secrets to Real Happiness," "The surprising keys to a happier marriage." We're apparently walking our journeys through life with lots of unhappy people, people constantly searching for the real secrets and the hidden truth about true joy.

Everyone knows the famous words written more than 200 years ago. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

If happiness is a self-evident and unalienable right, why is it so elusive? Being happy means "having, showing or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy; being joyous, glad, pleased."

Stacey Colino, in an article for Woman's Day magazine, asks a few simple questions: "When someone asks if you are happy, what do you usually say? Do you dance around the question, talking about how well things are going at work or how great your kids are doing? Or do you answer with a resounding yes?"

Most people, as Colino observes, do the tap dance number.

Colino's five secrets to real happiness are to tune in to your feelings, develop a can-do spirit, do something for yourself on a regular basis, nurture a spiritual connection and increase your capacity for joy. All easier said than done. But all five "secrets" correspond with what other experts say is the true secret.

So how do you know if you're truly happy? And if you are happy, how do you stay that way?

The experts - people who get paid to figure out why so many other folks are unhappy - provide a couple of clues. In a special report on happiness, The Futurist magazine asked two psychology professors who study happiness and well-being, to provide some insight on the science of happiness. Happy people, they report, are those who smile more, seem satisfied, are "more loving, forgiving, trusting, energetic, decisive, creative, sociable and helpful" than their disgruntled, hostile and abusive counterparts.

Given the average life expectancy and based on polls, people from Iceland rate the most overall years of happy life: 62. The average person in the United States will be happy 57.8 years. Russians, according to the data from the Washington Post, are happy just 34.5 years of their lives.

Many Americans pursue happiness in material things, like the conspicuous-consumption New Yorkers portrayed by Tim Allen and Kristie Alley in the film "For Richer or Poorer." They found happiness not in their penthouse apartment but living a simple life in the midst of an Amish community.

Researchers David G. Myers and Ed Diener say most people agree that money itself can't buy happiness, but more money would make most people happier. Spending and personal income are generally higher than in previous times, but "economic growth in affluent countries provides no apparent boost to human morale." That means you can't spend yourself happy, but you can spend yourself broke - which, of course, leads to an unhappy state of mind.

A wealthy person can be just as happy as an impoverished one, depending on how each person views the world. "We find in life exactly what we put into it," Ralph Waldo Emerson told us. The essayist also said, "each moment, never seen before, shall never be seen again."

When we live our lives by the moment, finding as much joy as possible in what we already have and cherishing the who we already are, the secret of happiness has been found.